Series editors: Tobias Hagmann and Benedetta Zocchi
The XCEPT Theories of Border Violence Series publishes theoretically informed research on the causes and consequences of political violence in contemporary borderlands. Authored by leading scholars in the field, the series offers heterodox interpretations of conflict, power and governance in and across globally entangled borders, borderlands and frontiers. The series advances theories, concepts, and causal models that explain why, how, and when borderlands become sites of political violence.
The papers centre the ways in which extractive and exploitative practices manifest in borderlands and their relation to conflict dynamics. They highlight how border infrastructure, citizenship, extraction, capitalism, and environmental destruction can become intertwined with violence in borderlands. The papers offer insights into drivers of violence and conflict by:
- Rethinking borders, frontiers and borderlands: The series highlights borders, frontiers and borderlands as, both, sites of state formation, which are foundational in the consolidation of territory and the construction of the modern state, and sites of racial capitalist accumulation through the interconnected processes of containment and expansion which service logics of extraction and result in slow and spectacular violence.
- Interrogating the construction of borders: The papers explore how borders are produced through labour, including the labour of committing violence against people moving across borders, and the extraction of economic value along borders and how borders are shaped by the arrangements which mobilise border infrastructure to enact state power, structure mobility, and animate political violence in borderlands.
- Questioning the imaginary of citizenship: The series challenges the assumed good of citizenship to highlight that, alongside the benefits it provides, the hierarchisation, production and enforcement of citizenship is imbued with violence which is exacerbated and amplified in borderlands.
- Highlighting the entanglements of border violence and environmental violence: The series explores why conflict-affected and militarised borderlands rank among the world’s most toxically contaminated and ecologically devastated spaces.
Scholars engaged under this workstream:
- Bridget Anderson
- Natalie Brinham
- Francesco Buscemi
- Nicholas De Genova
- Nyi Nyi Kyaw
- Nivi Manchanda
- Alessandro Rippa
- Jasnea Sarma
- Michael J. Watts
For more information regarding this research, contact [email protected]
Theory papers
Violence at the margins of the state: concepts, critiques and contributions | Francesco Buscemi
The ability to establish borders is crucial to establishing territory and governing communities. As such, the question of violence at the margins lies at the heart of modern state projects. Drawing together scholarship from geography, international relations, political science and anthropology, this paper asks a number of fundamental questions, such as: Where does the state end? How is power and political authority configured at the so-called ‘margins’? And what can we learn about state formation by studying these areas? Building on these questions, the paper explores how scholars have made sense of violence in state margins. Specifically, the paper distils five recurrent explanations for violence in borderlands. These are: 1) expansion of sovereign authority into marginal spaces; 2) lack of state control or capacity by the political centre (including a monopoly on violence); 3) the role of infrastructures and materiality; 4) effects of global militarism networks and war; and 5) how people at the margins experience violent settings. Reviewing these different explanations, the paper provides an interdisciplinary state-of-the-art of a vast body of literature, offering a nuanced understanding of how different scholarly communities understand violence at the margins.
Border as infrastructure: violence and the technopolitics of connectivity and containment | Alessandro Rippa
In recent decades, the expansion of biometric surveillance has displaced and multiplied borders across the world. This is reflective of how border infrastructure – such as roads, railways, fences, checkpoints, markets, pipelines and biometric databases – operates as a tool of securitisation, legitimising certain forms of exchange and mobility while marginalising others. The paper argues that, rather than treating infrastructures as passive instruments of state power, attention to the wider socio‑technical configuration of infrastructure spotlights the agency exerted by infrastructural arrangements. First, the paper shows how border infrastructures are central to a contemporary regime in which connectivity and securitisation are mutually constitutive: roads, corridors and digital networks introduced to enhance flows also lead to new chokepoints, surveillance capabilities and exclusionary practices. Second, it details how these infrastructural arrangements enact forms of violence that are often slow, dispersed and racialised, exposing certain populations to heightened risk and reduced mobility while shielding and enabling others. Finally, the paper highlights how infrastructural agency means that, once built, these systems shape conflict trajectories in ways not envisaged by planners or states. Empirical vignettes drawn from the author’s long-term ethnographic research along the China–Pakistan and China–Myanmar borders illustrate these dynamics.
Citizenship unsettled: rethinking legal and social identities in conflict affected borderlands | Bridget Anderson, Natalie Brinham, Nyi Nyi Kyaw
Citizenship is widely hailed as an unquestionable good. Contradicting such conventional accounts, this paper advances the concept of ‘citizenising violence’: harm produced not by the absence of citizenship, but rather its production and enforcement. Borderlands render this violence particularly visible, not because they are exceptional, but because they foreground citizenship’s governing logics in their most explicit form: such areas reveal how law is partial, membership is plural and protection is conditional. Drawing on cases from Myanmar’s borderlands, and beyond, the paper examines three analytically distinct but interrelated forms of citizenising violence: 1) exclusion; 2) hierarchy; and 3) surveillance and repression. The authors demonstrates that, while international organisations continue to provide financial and technical support for national ID systems and centralised civil registries, the reality is that resources aimed at building the state’s capacity to identify, register and document people also increase the capacity of said state to surveil, repress and exclude.
Podcasts
In collaboration with De Verbranders, XCEPT is producing The Theories of Border Violence Podcast series which is forthcoming in December 2026